Michael was spending less time in the office too. He was in later—sometimes quite late, and looking like he had not slept—and he left earlier. Indeed, he seemed to have something on his mind. For instance, he had started to stare out the window. That was not something he had ever done in the past, and now he would sit there for minutes at a time, while the Coke hissed in his cup, staring out the window at the East End sky.
‘Michael,’ James would say.
And Michael would not seem to hear.
‘Michael!
’
And finally he would turn his oversized, unkempt head—exactly the way that Hugo did—unhurriedly and with a vacant expression in his docile chocolate eyes.
None of this prepared James for the phone call he received one Monday morning in early November.
He was out with Hugo when Freddy phoned. This was surprising in itself—it was not even eight.
‘I thought you might want to know,’ Freddy said, with a smile in his voice, ‘that Michael is in police custody.’
‘What?’
‘I thought you might want to know,’ Freddy said, even more slowly than the first time, ‘that Michael is in police custody. I’m not joking.’ He started to laugh. ‘He’s in a cell in Thamesmead Police Station.’
‘What are you talking about? Why?’
‘You’ll love this. Some sort of sexual assault.’
A long silence. Then James said, ‘You’re joking…’
‘No I’m not! That’s the point. I’m not joking! I just found out myself.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘Melissa. She sent me a text. I just spoke to her…’
‘What did she say?’
‘Just what I told you. Michael’s in a police cell, and it’s some sort of sex offence. I don’t know what he did exactly,’ Freddy said. ‘I just thought it was quite amusing.’ He seemed frustrated that James did not share his amusement.
‘You’re not joking?’ James said.
‘No.’
‘What’s Melissa’s number?’
‘Why?’
‘I need to speak to her. I need to find out what the fuck is going on.’
Melissa was on her way to work.
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ she said. She didn’t sound particularly put out. ‘Michael’s in the nick.’
He was apparently arrested on Sunday morning at the house of a woman who lived a few streets away in Shooter’s Hill.
The facts emerged at the trial the following summer. What seems to have happened is this—some time in September Michael was in a supermarket near his home. As he was paying, something startled him and he dropped his money onto the floor. The woman who was next in the queue had helped him pick it up. She smiled at him. Their hands momentarily touched. That was the first time he saw her.
Starting the next morning, he waited near the supermarket, hoping to see her again. When he did, he followed her home. It was a few days later that she first noticed him. She started seeing him in unexpected places, sometimes far from Shooter’s Hill—on the tube, in shops in the West End—and it was obvious that he was following her. When he followed her home and stood waiting outside, she phoned the police.
The next day they stopped him in the street and issued an informal warning. They told the woman they expected he was ‘scared out of his wits’ by their intervention—he had looked scared out of his wits when they walked up to him—and that he would now leave her alone. And he seemed to, until a week or so later she spotted him outside her office and he followed her onto the Docklands Light Railway. It was typical of Michael that when the police told him he’d be in trouble if he kept hanging around outside her house, he started hanging around outside her office instead. The second warning was more formal than the first. This time they took him to the station and made him sit in an interview room for an hour while they said things like, ‘You don’t want to go to prison, do you, Michael?’ They said that if they had to have him in again they would tell his ‘mum and dad’. ‘And what would they think, Michael, if they knew about this? Eh?’
For a few weeks there was no sign of him.
Slowly she stopped expecting to see him everywhere.
(This was the time of maximum listlessness in the office, of prolonged window-staring through sleepless eyes.)
Then one Sunday morning she was in the bath and thought she heard a noise downstairs. She stayed very still in the water, listening. There was a long, tingling silence. Then there was the sound of something smashing. To the hollow thump of footsteps on the stairs, her wet hands fumbled tremblingly with the lock. There was only one tiny window, which did not even open properly. Terrified, in tears, she was wrapping herself in a towel when someone tried the door. The pathetic flimsy lock had no hope of withstanding his weight. It surrendered at the first meaningful shove.
What was strange was that he did not seem to know what to do—not even what he
wanted
to do. A shocking male presence in the small pink-tiled space of the bathroom, he had her in his hands and did not seem to know what to do with her. When he started to move his hairy face towards hers—perhaps he was trying to kiss her—without thinking, with a sort of instinct, she sank her teeth into his forearm—he was pinning her shoulders to the wall—and immediately tasted his blood in her mouth like an old iron nail. He yelped and unpinned her, and she pushed past him and locked herself in her bedroom, from where she phoned the police.
She would not leave her room while he was still there—and for some reason he
was
still there when the police arrived, at speed and with wailing sirens. She threw the keys out the window and they let themselves into the house, where they found him still sitting on the linoleum by the toilet, holding the wound on his arm. (The puncture marks made by her teeth were plainly visible in the meat of his forearm, like a pair of dotted parentheses in a purple bruise.) He did not seem to understand what had happened, or what was happening.
Now, Melissa told James, he was indeed in a cell in Thamesmead Police Station, awaiting trial for a number of quite serious offences. Her parents had been to see him. A solicitor had appeared from somewhere. Michael himself seemed to be in a state of shock—he had not said a word since the police found him sitting next to the toilet, pathetically nursing his hurt arm.
‘He’s got an appointment with the psychiatrist this afternoon,’ Melissa said.
‘The psychiatrist?’ James said, starting to understand that this was probably the end of Professional Equine Investments.
There was however one loose end—Absent Oelemberg. Together, he and Freddy own half the horse. The other half is owned by her trainer, Simon Miller, who Freddy met in a Fenland pub one Saturday last November. Freddy told him he had owned horses in the past (which he hadn’t), and Miller, who was not totally sober, said that one of his owners had just died, an old fellow name of Maurice something. He had owned a half share in an ex-French mare in the stable and, if Freddy was interested, the heirs were looking to sell. When Freddy said he
was
interested, Miller went further and hinted that he was hoping to land a ‘nice little touch’ with the horse, who had not yet run in the UK.
The next morning, Freddy phoned James. He told him that he, Freddy, had an inexpensive opportunity to own a horse in training with ‘one of the top jumps trainers in the country’.
‘Who’s that then?’ James sounded sceptical.
‘Simon Miller,’ Freddy said. He was using his this-is-serious-now voice. ‘We have to move fast on this, though.’
‘We… ?’
‘Miller wants ten grand for a half share.’
‘A half share? Who owns the other half?’
‘Miller does. He says he wants to hold on to half himself. He knows what he’s doing. He’s pretty shrewd,’ Freddy said. ‘And there’s something else. You’ll like this. He’s hoping to land a touch with her early next year.’
Freddy explained what Miller had told him in the pub the night before. Miller had been so drunk that it had taken a long time for Freddy to work out what he was saying. Essentially it was this: Absent Oelemberg was a smart ex-French mare—‘a useful tool’ was the expression Miller had used, slurring it so egregiously—
eryoofustoowil
—that at first Freddy had not even been able to make out what the words
were,
let alone what he meant by them. What he seemed to mean was a horse who would win her share of handicaps. Freddy had pretended to know all about the handicapping system, and fortunately Miller was much too drunk to notice that he had had to explain it to him from first principles himself. His plan for Absent Oelemberg was to ensure that she did not show her true ability in her first few races—she would then be assigned a handicap mark which was too low, from which she would therefore be able to win easily. And since she would have performed so poorly until then, the odds available on her in her first handicap would be very long. Thus you would have a horse at very long odds who you knew would win easily.
‘Well?’ Freddy said expectantly.
For some time, James said nothing. Thoroughbred ownership was an interesting prospect. On the other hand, this was Freddy on the phone on a Sunday morning, sounding like he was still drunk, with a proposition put together with a very drunk stranger in a pub the night before. It was not exactly investment grade. Not exactly triple-A. And James would unquestionably have said
no,
were it not for the embellishment of the touch. What Freddy understood was that James would see the touch as something he would be able to use for Professional Equine Investments.
Still, he slept on it.
Then the next morning he phoned Freddy and said he was prepared to put in his share.
And Freddy said that actually he would have to put in the whole £10,000 because he—Freddy—was skint at the moment. He would pay James back with his winnings, he said, when the touch went in, and since it had been Freddy who found the opportunity in the first place, when he had let him sweat for a few days, James lent him the money.
They went up to Cambridgeshire the following Sunday and stood in the stable yard, trying to look as if they knew what they were doing, Freddy fiddling with a hip flask, while Miller’s ‘head lad’—despite the youthful-sounding moniker, a middle-aged man—led the mare out of the stables and into the middle of the slurry-puddled, straw-strewn yard. She seemed fine—that is, there was nothing obviously wrong with her. She
was
quite unusual-looking. The visual effect was of a blackish-blue flecked with snow. And she was surprisingly small. She shook her head, tinkling the tack.
It was a frosty morning, and they were tired. Miller had insisted on meeting at eight. He stood there, taciturn, small eyes sly under a tweed peak, watching them while they watched the mare. (Ladylike, she lifted her tail and let fall a small heap of shiny manure.) He had been suspicious of Freddy at first. The morning after their meeting in the pub, up at half five as usual and monstrously hungover, he had sworn at himself for speaking so freely to a stranger—a stranger, what’s more, who had plied him all night with whisky and pints, while finding out more and more about his operation on the pretext of being a potential owner. That was what all the snoopers said. If something seems too good to be true, he told himself, his head throbbing as he watched the lads and lasses take the string out—it was a foul winter morning of horizontal sleet, not properly light yet—it probably is. And that this funny-looking posh fellow from London would just show up and pay £10,000 for a half share in the mare did seem too good to be true. And yet here he was, a week later, with his mate, and the money.
‘What d’you think?’ Simon said, eyeing them.
James stuck out his lower lip and nodded appraisingly. Freddy had a nervous swig from his hip flask.
The transaction transacted, they went into the house and had a heart-stopping fry-up prepared by Mrs Miller. It was an awkward meal. When James asked about the name Absent Oelemberg—what did it mean?—Miller just shook his head and said, ‘No idea.’
‘It’s probably French,’ James suggested politely.
Miller shrugged and went on feeding his smooth, fat face.
In London, Michael was being arrested.
The mare’s first run was in late December, in a novices’ hurdle at Huntingdon. (Though Professional Equine Investments no longer existed, and she would have to be sold, James had decided to land the touch first. Now that the service had failed he needed the money more than ever. He would be staking every penny he had on her, and he hoped to win enough to live on for a year or more, while he worked out what to do next.) Huntingdon was Miller’s local track. He had informed his new owners that it was where the touch would take place in March, and he wanted her to have run poorly there on at least one previous occasion. He also said that they should ‘have a few quid on’. When they looked at him in surprise, he said, ‘She won’t be winning. Not today.’ He said they should put the money on over the Internet, where it would leave indelible traces, so that when it was time to land the touch, if the stewards had any questions, they would be able to prove that they always followed her, win or lose. And in December she did lose. In the leathern privacy of his Range Rover, Miller had told them she wasn’t fit, and she looked unhealthily exhausted as she trailed in last with her tongue lolling out of her smoking head and the jockey standing up in his irons. His name was Tom. He was a stable insider, the son of Miller’s head lad. Later, in the pub—not the nearest pub to the track, an obscure village pub twenty miles away somewhere in the stunning flatness of the Fens—James noticed him whispering something to Miller, who nodded and patted him on the back.
Her next run was two weeks later, also at Huntingdon. She was twenty to one that day (James still had his few quid on) and she finished tenth of twelve. Miller was not keen to talk about what measures he was taking to make sure she performed so ignominiously, and anyway James had other things on his mind, or one other thing—Katherine, who he met at Toby’s wedding. The previous night he had taken her on the lamplit tour of the Sir John Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and then for dinner. It was nearly midnight when he walked her to the tube at Holborn. (She had declined an invitation for a nightcap at his flat.) They stopped on the pavement at the station entrance.